Early life

Alger Hiss was born November 11, 1904, in Baltimore, Maryland[5] to a financially comfortable upper-middle-class[6]WASP[7] family. His father, an executive with a wholesale dry goods firm,[8] committed suicide by slashing his throat with a razor when Alger was just two years old.[9] When Hiss was 25, his sister Mary Ann also committed suicide, by drinking a bottle of Lysol.[10] Two years earlier, Alger's older brother Bosley, a Baltimore Sun reporter,[11] had died at age 26 from a kidney disorder attributed to excessive alcohol consumption.[12]

After such a series of tragic losses, suggested Hiss's son, Alger might have found himself "susceptible, as some may have been, to the seeming solidarity offered by the Communist Party."[13] Among others susceptible to this lure was Hiss's future tenant, Whittaker Chambers, who wrote of the suicide of his own brother at age 21:

“

[M]y brother's death stunned me ... this is the point at which I became a thorough Communist. I felt that any society which could result in the death of a boy like my brother was wrong and I was at war with it. This was the beginning of my fanaticism.[14]

By that year, Priscilla had registered as a member of the Socialist Party,[46] serving (along with various "Communists, Socialists, and nonaffiliated radicals") on the Advisory Board of American Labor Associates;[47] Alger, meanwhile (together with Pressman),[48]had joined the International Juridical Association (IJA),[49] which "consistently followed the Communist Party line."[50]

Other members of this cell included Hiss's Harvard friends Collins and Pressman (who would join the Communist Party about this time),[69] as well as Witt (who would be identified as a fellow Communist by Pressman),[70]secret CommunistJohn Abt[71] and Soviet spy[72]Charles Kramer. Abt would later admit having been a member of the Ware group,[73] as would Communist writer Hope Hale Davis, who would write that its meetings involved discussions of how to "achieve promotion—a primary goal," or whether to "try to influence policy," as well as "secret directives—for purloining official documents," etc.;[74] This influx of radicals caused AAA administrator George Peek to resign in protest, writing:

“

A plague of young lawyers settled on Washington. They all claimed to be friends of somebody or other and mostly of Felix Frankfurter and Jerome Frank[75]... in the legal division were formed the plans which eventually turned the AAA from a device to aid the farmers into a device to introduce the collectivist system of agriculture into this country.[76]

Late in the day of our dismissal Wallace sent word that he would see two of the people on the dismissal list. Jerome Frank and a member of his legal staff, Alger Hiss, were delegated for the interview. Wallace haltingly greeted them (and, through them, others on the list) as "the best fighters in a good cause" he had ever worked with. But he said that he had to fire them.

”

As it turned out, Jackson, Frank and Pressman were indeed fired—but Hiss was not. "Alger must have known at least a week before the purge that it was coming," said Jackson. "He undoubtedly told Pressman, and Lee told him what to do in order to remain in the Department as his pipeline."[80]

Frank, believing Hiss to be closely linked to a coterie of Communist lawyers at the agency, would later refuse to appear as a character witness for him.[81] According to reporters Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky (who covered the trials for Newsweek and the New York World-Telegram, respectively): "When Hiss's lawyers approached a well-known jurist to ask him if he would appear as a character witness [for Hiss]...he said tartly: 'I have no way of knowing whether or not Mr. Hiss was ever a Communist. But as to his character—Mr. Hiss has no character.'"[82]

The Soviets took great interest in the work of the committee for its propaganda value[96] as well as its access to classified documents on U.S. armaments and foreign policy.[97]Moscow had at least one source on the staff of the committee, who provided valuable documents to the Kremlin in 1935,[98] the same year an agent later code-named "Ales" (pronounced "Alles") began working for Soviet military intelligence. The committee's chief investigator, Stephen Rauschenbusch,[99] would later refuse to testify as a character witness for Hiss;[100] Nye would tell FBI investigators that he believed Hiss was a Communist during his time on the committee,[101] and would later say he believed Hiss used his position for espionage.[102]

Barely a month after joining the committee staff,[103]Hiss metWhittaker Chambers. A decade later, "Vadim" (Anatoly Gorsky, then chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S.)[104] would report to Moscow that "‘Ales’ ... used to work in ‘Karl’s’ informational group, which was affiliated with the neighbors"[105] (According to NSA cryptographers, "neighbors" was the code name for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence);[106] three years after that, Gorsky would identify "Karl" as "Whittaker Chambers, former editor in chief of 'Time' magazine. Traitor."[107]

According to Chambers, he was introduced to Hiss by Communist underground boss[108]J. Peters;[109] Hiss would claim that Chambers had wandered into his office without introduction, as a free-lancewriter looking for a story. Chambers' version would be corroborated by the radical novelist Josephine Herbst, whose then-husband, John Herrmann, was an AAA official, a member of the Ware group[110] and a courier for the Communist underground[111] subordinate to Chambers.[112] Correspondence between Herrmann and Herbst confirms Chambers' testimony "to the detriment of Hiss";[113] Hiss would later claim that he did not even know Herrmann—a "lie," according to Herbst's biographer.

…that Rosen did lend himself to a dummy transaction concerning the Ford car.... [A]t some later date, a man came to see Rosen and told him that the title certificate to the Ford was in Rosen's name and asked Rosen to sign an assignment of it to some other person. Rosen did this. The man who came to see Rosen was a very high Communist. His name would be a sensation in this case. The man who ultimately got the car is also a Communist. Bloch implied that Rosen was a Communist too....[123]

”

The title transfer bore a signature Hiss acknowledged to be his own,[124] notarized by Hiss's Justice Department colleague W. Marvin Smith. In 1948 Smith would tell the Thomas committee that he had notarized Hiss's signature on the transfer,[125] but before he could so testify in the Hiss trial, Smith would would be found dead from a fall down a five-story Justice Department stairwell; there would be no witnesses.[126]

Hede Massing and Noel Field

The name “Alger Hiss” in Cyrillic (Алджер Хисс) from Alexander Vassiliev's notes on an April 1936 report from Hede Massing to Moscow Center. Image source: Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Field would defect in 1948 to CommunistCzechoslovakia, where he would tell the secret police that he was fleeing to avoid testifying in the trial of Alger Hiss, whom he identified as a fellow Communist underground agent in the State Department during the mid-thirties, according to official records published in 1990 by Karel Kaplan, former archivist of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party.[128] A 1955 Czechoslovak secret police reinvestigation (obtained in 2000 by Czech human rights activist Karel Skrabek) states, "Noel Field said that … Hiss worked for the USSR as a spy."[129] Field would end up in Communist Hungary, where in 1954 he would tell Hungarian secret police that he and Hiss "mutually realized we were Communists. Around the summer of 1935 Alger Hiss tried to induce me to do service for the Soviets."[130]

The transcripts also record Fieldsaying that he turned overState Department documents to Hede Massing in the 1930s. In other statements Field twice said that although Hiss knew that Field “was a Communist,” he strongly supported Field at the State Department and even tried to help him obtain a job as a State Department adviser in the Philippines in 1940.[131] The dossier likewise records a statement by Field that he briefly visited Hiss in 1939 in America, where they agreed that if either's cover was ever blown, he would communicate to the other indirectly.[132] Shortly before his death in 2001, Field's brother Hermann said the dossier was accurate: Noel Field confirmed to him, said his brother, that Hiss was a spy.

The name “A. Hiss” and code name "Yurist" (Jurist) in Cyrillic (А. Хисс—"Юрист") from Vassiliev's notes on a Moscow Center annotation. Image source: Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

In a 1936 memorandum, found in the NKVD archives by former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev, Massing complains to Moscow that Field (whom she refers to by his code name "Ernst")[133] "was approached by Alger Hiss" (Massing uses his real name), who "informed him that he is a Communist" with "ties to an organization working for the Sov. Union" —a serious breach of discipline. (A Moscow Center annotation identifies "A. Hiss" as the GRU agent designated by the code name "Jurist.")[134] As a result, noted Boris Bazarov, OGPU "illegal" station chief for the United States,[135] Field "and Hiss [Bazarov also used Hiss's real name] have been openly identified" as Soviet agents.[136]

Chambers' version was corroborated by Marxist[145]Columbia Universityart historian Meyer Schapiro, who confirmed that he arranged the purchase (and produced the canceled check dated December 23, 1936); by the Massachusetts Importing Company of Manhattan, which confirmed selling him the rugs (and produced the Bill of Sale); by White's widow and Silverman (who confirmed that they had received their rugs sometime between late 1936 and the fall of 1938); and by Wadleigh, who confessed to having been a member of Chambers' apparatus and delivering documents to him, confirmed that he had received his rug for New Year's 1937,[146] and conceded that he understood the rug to be a gift from the Soviets.

On November 23, 1937, Whittaker Chambers bought a used car, using $400 (equivalent to more than $6,000 today) he said Alger Hiss loaned him.[152] Hiss would deny making the loan, but records showed that the Hisses withdrew $400 in cash from their savings four days before Chambers bought the car.[153] At first the Hisses claimed that they had used the money to buy furniture for a new house, but they had not signed a lease at the time,[154] and could not produce receipts for any purchases, nor explain why they had used cash from savings rather than the checking and charge accounts they otherwise used for such purchases.[155]

In 1938, Whittaker Chambers made his final break with the Communists.[156] The break came as a result of Chambers' insight that "The communist vision is the vision of Man without God." This vision he found increasingly untenable as the birth of his daughter gave rise to Chambers' spiritual awakening:

“

She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life.... My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design." The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.[157]

In 1939, Sayre became United States High Commissioner to the Philippines, and Hiss transferred to become personal aide to Stanley Hornbeck, political advisor to the State Department's Far Eastern Division. When Hiss first walked into the office, Hornbeck advised him that he had been warned that Hiss was "a red."[166] Foreign Service Officer Max Waldo Bishop, who worked in the same office, said Hiss occasionally had "dubious, Left Wing characters in his office."[167]

Hiss meanwhile urged Sayre to hire as his replacement Soviet Intelligence sourceNoel Field, despite his lack of experience.[168] Due to the fact that Field had been identified to the State Department as a member of various Red front groups starting in 1926, and as a Communist Party member the previous year,[169] he did not get the appointment. Sayre would later refuse to testify as a character witness for Hiss.[170] After his defection behind the Iron Curtain, Field would confirm to East bloc authorities that Hiss knew he was a Communist when he recommended Field as his replacement.[171]

While Chambers talked, Berle took notes. Under the heading “Underground Espionage Agent,” he listed several names, including “Alger Hiss,” with the notation, “Ass’t. to Sayre—CP—1937,” and “Member of the Underground Com.—Active.”[184] In Berle's diary, the entry for September 4, 1939 reads:

“

Isaac Don Levine in his contact with the Krivitzky [sic] matter had opened up another idea of the Russian espionage. He brought a Mr. X around to my house on Saturday evening.... Through a long evening, I slowly manipulated Mr. X to a point where he had told some of the ramifications hereabout; and it becomes necessary to take a few simple measures. I expect more of this kind of thing, later. A good deal of the Russian espionage was carried on by Jews; we know now that they are exchanging information with Berlin; and the Jewish units are furious to find out they are, in substance, working for the Gestapo.[185]

”

Before the month was out, the Nazi and Soviet armies staged a joint victory parade through the streets of occupied Brest-Litovsk, Poland,[186] where the Soviets handed over to the Gestapo some 600 prisoners, "most of them Jews."[187]

But when it came to Chambers' allegation about Hiss, Berle “scoffed at the charge,” according the Public Broadcasting System's NOVA Online. “I have vague recollections of having mentioned the matter to the President when shortly thereafter we were working on the Foreign Agents Registration Act [FARA],” claimed Berle, “which was the real, tangible outcome of this....”[188] (Berle's “vague recollections” were mistaken: FARA was actually enacted in 1938—the year before he met with Chambers.) According to his diary, Berle discussed the matter with the FDR's secretary Marvin McIntyre, but not until 1942.[189] According to Levine:

“

Although I learned later, from two different sources who had social relations with Berle, that Roosevelt, in effect, had told him to "go jump in a lake" upon the suggestion of a probe into the Chambers charges, I do not recall hearing that exact phrase from Berle. To the best of my recollection, the President dismissed the matter rather brusquely with an expletive[190] remark on this order: "Oh, forget it, Adolf."[191]

”

In 1940, after Levine informed Bullitt of what Chambers had told him about Hiss, Bullitt relayed to Hornbeck what Daladier had told him the year before. Bullitt advised Alice Roosevelt Longworth and de Toledano that he also took this information directly to FDR. Levine also told David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union about Chambers' revelations. Dubinsky, wrote Levine, "took up the Chambers matter with the President at the first opportunity and was brushed off with an amiable slap on the back." Levine wrote that he also told fellow journalist Walter Winchell of "a ring of six Soviet agents operating within the State Department alone. In his broadcast of December 12, Winchell announced that he had carried my information to President Roosevelt. Still there was no action."[192]

Berle, in contrast, would find his State Department career soon over. In 1948 he would be serving as chairman of New York's Liberal Party, working for the reelection of PresidentHarry Truman. That year, the New York bureau of the Christian Science Monitor would send a teletype to the home office in Boston, relating a background interview with the party's publicity director, Arnold Beichman:

“

From a thoroughly reliable contact: According to this informant Berle has said privately that classified material which Hiss was handling was reaching the Russians. It was coded stuff. Berle took the handling out of Hiss's hands and the leaks stopped.[200]

”

But in the wake of Dumbarton Oaks, Berle had been ousted as Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security, defeated by the State Department's pro-Soviet faction, Hiss prominent among them. As Berle put it:

“

[I]n the fall of 1944 there was a difference of opinion in the State Department. I felt that the Russians were not going to be sympathetic and cooperative....[I]ntelligence reports which were in my charge indicated a very aggressive policy, not at all in line with the kind of cooperation everyone was hoping for. I was pressing for a pretty clean-cut showdown then when our position was strongest. The opposite group in the State Department was largely ... Mr. Acheson's group ... with Mr. Hiss as his principal assistant in the matter.... [A]t that time Mr. Hiss did take what we would call today the pro-Russian point of view....[201] I got trimmed in that fight, and, as a result, went to Brazil, and that ended my diplomatic career.[202]

”

House Committee on Un-American Activities

Among those who directed the President's attention to the issue of Soviet agents in the government was Roosevelt's erstwhile congressional ally[203]Martin Dies, Democrat of Texas. The President, recalled Dies, was "furious"—not at the infiltration of his administration by agents of a foreign power then allied with the Nazis, but with Dies for mentioning it—"you must see a bug-a-boo under every bed," he railed, adding "there is nothing wrong with the Communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists."[204]

Lend-Lease

Unfortunately, this data about Hiss emerged just as the Nazi-Soviet alliance broke down. The Roosevelt administration promptly lost all interest in Communists, focusing its attention on hunting Nazi and fascist agents. Throughout the duration of the pact, Moscow had fiercely opposed U.S. aid to Britain[230] (which was fighting for its life against the Nazis), but now the U.S. extended its Lend-Lease program to the Soviet Union. In 1943, Stalin reciprocated by officially dissolving the Comintern,[231] forcing Soviet intelligence to reorganize its espionage channels in the United States.[232] The International Department of the CPSU Central Committee was created that year essentially to carry out functions previously performed by the Comintern[233] (which included “control over the CPUSA”),[234] gradually transferring Comintern assets and networks to direct NKVD control.[235] Hiss was by this time among a handful of the Soviets' most important agents, who were run individually and not through spy networks, according to Oleg Gordievsky. Hiss's wartime controller, wrote Gordievsky, was Akhmerov, the leading NKVD illegal in the United States, who, in a lecture before a KGB audience, identified Hiss as a Soviet agent during World War II;[236] meanwhile, the Administrator of Lend-Lease was Harry Hopkins,[237] whom Akhmerov, according to Gordievsky, called "the most important of all Soviet war-time agents in the United States."[238] Moreover, "the bureaucrat who administered all but singlehandedly that division in the Treasury that was specifically in charge of proposing and overseeing foreign monetary aid, including Lend-Lease," was Harry Dexter White,[239]
one of "the most highly placed espionage sources the Soviets ever possessed."[240]

World War II U.S. propaganda poster proclaims Soviet Army "fights for FREEDOM." Courtesy Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State

In March 1943, U.S. Army Air Corps Major George R. Jordan opened several black suitcases leaving the U.S. bound for the Soviet Union. He found "hundreds of maps, patent documents, blueprints of industrial plants, railroad tables, and top-secret U.S. government documents," including "five or six State Department folders, bound with stout rubber bands. Clipped to each was a tab." From one tab, said Jordan, he copied the legend: “From Hiss.” According to Jordan, "I had never heard of Alger Hiss, and made the entry because the folder bearing his name happened to be second in the pile. It contained hundreds of Photostats of what seemed to be military reports."[241]

Jordan’s unlikely story would be corroborated by ex-NKVD agent[242]Anna Louise Strong, code-named "Map."[243] Strong boasted that—with the help of American millionaire[244] Louise Bransten and other “friends of the American Russian Institute” (a Communist front)—she passed at least one shipment of material in black suitcases to Moscow via Lend-Lease from Gore Field in Great Falls, Montana[245]—the same base where Maj. Jordan was stationed as a Lend-Lease expediter.[246] These black suitcases were protected by diplomatic immunity[247] from FBI searches, having been sealed “under the supervision of the Russian consulate” in San Francisco.[248] Bransten was not only a secret member of the Communist Party[249] and a Soviet agent[250] (code-named Lyre),[251] but also the mistress[252] of NKVD San Francisco Station ChiefGrigory Kheifets.

Jordan was U.S. liaison to the Soviet Purchasing Commission, an agency of the Soviet Union; his story would be further corroborated in April 1944, when Victor Kravchenko, economic attaché of that bureau, defected to the U.S.[253] He described preparing a shipment of "black suitcases" carrying industrial espionage to the Soviet Union via Lend-Lease,[254] and released a statement warning:

“

I cannot keep silent any longer.... I can no longer support double-faced political maneuvers... toward collaboration with the United States and Britain while pursuing aims incompatible with such collaboration.

Hiss served as aide to Stettinius, who was considered in some quarters to be "not very bright," according to Ambassador Ellis Briggs.[258] State Department chief of security and consular affairs Samuel D. Boykin agreed that Stettinius "was not brilliant." But, he added, the Secretary had the ability to utilize "other people's brains". The brain Stettinius most depended upon was that of his aide, the brilliant Alger Hiss. J. Anthony Panuch, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security,[259] noted that "Hiss exercises Svengali-like influence over the mental processes of Junior Stettinius."[260] Indeed, Stettinius gave Hiss control over FDR's access to information, directing that "all memoranda for the President on topics to be discussed at the Meeting of the Big Three should be in the hands of Mr. Alger Hiss not later than Monday, January 15."[261]

By this time, "Roosevelt was not always master over his mind," according to Professor Felix Wittmer, a refugee from Nazi persecution.[262] "At Yalta he could neither think consecutively nor express himself coherently," agreed former Soviet propagandist[263] W.H. Chamberlin. With less than three months to live, the President suffered "occa­sional blackouts of memory, and loss of capacity for mental concen­tration."[264] His face was "gray, gaunt, and sagging and the muscles controlling the lips seemed to have lost part of their function," wrote New Dealliberal[265] John Gunther. "I felt certain that he was going to die."[266] According to James Farley, former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee:

“

In our evaluation of President Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and I agreed that he was a sick man at Yalta and should not have been called upon to make decisions affecting this country and the world. Physical illness, we knew, taxed his mind and left him in no shape to bargain with such hard bargainers as the Russians...[267]

”

Roosevelt's cardiologist agreed: At the conference, Roosevelt “was obviously greatly fatigued,” he observed. “His color was very poor (gray).”[268] Dr. Roger Lee, then president of the American Medical Association, wrote during Yalta that Roosevelt “was irascible and became very irritable if he had to concentrate his mind for long. If anything was brought up that wanted thinking out he would change the subject.”[269]Chicago Tribune reporter Orville Dwyer reported that Dr. Louis E. Schmidt, a confidante of Roosevelt’s daughter Anna, informed him that at Yalta FDR suffered frequent brain seizures, during which

“

he would be unconscious (completely out) although sitting up and apparently functioning for periods of from a few seconds to several minutes. Dr Schmidt said he has no doubt from his conversations with Anna that these were occurring regularly at the time he was meeting with Churchill and Stalin and holding other momentous conferences of the utmost importance to the United States. He said the effect would be that he would be cognizant of what was going on, then suddenly lose the thread completely for anywhere from a few seconds to two or three minutes—and that he could not possibly have known what was going on in between.[270]

”

“The President seemed placid and frail,” wrote Winston Churchill. “I felt that he had a slender contact with life.”[271] "Winston is puzzled and distressed," noted Churchill's physician. "The President no longer seems to the P.M. to take an intelligent interest in the war; often he does not seem even to read the papers the P.M. gives him."[272] He commented:

“

Everyone seemed to agree that the President had gone to bits physically....He intervened very little in discussions, sitting with his mouth open....I doubt, from what I have seen, whether he is fit for his job here.[273] To a doctor's eye, the president appears a sick man. He has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries of the brain in an advanced stage....[274]

”

In his memoirs, Churchill's bodyguard Walter Thompson would later recall seeing the Prime Minister

The deterioration in Roosevelt's judgement became evident in some of his more controversial statements at Yalta, including the following, recorded in the formerly Top Secret minutes two weeks after the liberation of Aushwitz:

“

MARSHAL STALIN asked whether the President intended to make any concessions to Ibn Saud [King of Saudi Arabia].

THE PRESIDENT replied that there was only one concession he thought he might offer and that was to give him the six million Jews in the United States.

”

United Nations planning

As what Harvard Historian Serhii Plokhi calls "the State Department's expert on the United Nations" at Yalta, Hiss was involved in discussions preceeding the secret agreement[275] to give the Soviet Union three votes in the UN to one for the U.S. Although Hiss officially opposed this decision, there was some confusion as to how it had come about: According to Hiss, the British informed him that US agreement to this Soviet demand had come from Stettinius himself, but Stettinus denied that he had ever made such an agreement.[276] Later urging Roosevelt to tell the U.S. delegation to the UN founding conference "the whole truth" about this agreement (which he called "this X-matter"), Stettinius would advise FDR to have Hiss with him when he broke the news to the American delegates.[277] The President would be dead within a month; this agreement would not be disclosed for another two years.[278]

'Traitors'

The Soviets, already covertly informed of Roosevelt's declining health, bugged the U.S. quarters, and listened avidly.[279] On February 4, 1945, Hiss accompanied FDR to his meeting with Churchill and Stalin. According to Robert Louis Benson, former Technical Director for Counterintelligence at the National Security Agency[280] (NSA), and Cecil Phillips, a cryptanalyst who was instrumental in cracking the Soviet code, "The Russians came to the table with ample knowledge of our purposes and attitudes, through information provided to them by traitors whose deeds ultimately were revealed in Venona."[281] But Venona is not the only source: According to Harvard historian Serhii Plokhii, "New evidence from the Soviet archives supports the thesis that Hiss was a Soviet spy at the time of the Yalta Conference."[282] "One of the officials [at Yalta] we had established confidential relations with was Alger Hiss," who was, according to Sudoplatov, "highly sympathetic to the interests of the Soviet Union."[283] According to confidential GRU sources, during the conference, Hiss gave daily briefings to Stalin's military adviser, General Mikhail Abramovich Milshtein (deputy director of the GRU), revealing not only the American negotiating strategy but insights into the attitudes of the American negotiators.[284] Sudoplatov added:

“

In conversation, Hiss disclosed to Oumansky, and then Litvinov,[285] official U.S. attitudes and plans; he was also very close to our sources who were cooperating with Soviet intelligence and to our active intelligence operators in the United States. Within this framework of exchange of confidential information were references to Hiss as the source who told us the Americans were prepared to make a deal in Europe.[286]

China

Hiss had input even on China. During pre-conference negotiations with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, regarding the war with Japan, "Mr. Hiss brought up the question of China," according to the formerly Top Secret minutes, "and stressed the importance which the United States attaches to U.S.-British-Soviet encouragement and support for an agreement between the Commintern [sic] and the Chinese Congress [sic]."[290] The British, due to their interests in Hong Kong and Singapore, had influence with the Kuomintang, but none with the Communists; the Soviets, who did have influence with the Communists, were not present (because they were not at war with Japan). The only effect Hiss had in bringing up the issue therefore was to co-opt the British to pressure the Chinese government into acquiescing to a Kremlin-backed power-sharing arrangement with the rebels, thus granting a measure of legitimacy to forces dedicated to its destruction—a policy that Acheson would subsequently use as a pretext to obstruct aid to China[291]—a move that would prove catastrophic for the Chinese.[292]

Among the "memoranda for the President" Stettinius directed be placed "in the hands of Mr. Alger Hiss," according to retired U.S. intelligence analyst Christina Shelton, was a position paper registering the State Department's strong opposition to turning over to the USSR the southern Kurile and Sakhalin islands. This State Department memo never made it into the Yalta briefing books, but did make it to Moscow, where it would be found in the Russian archives after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Apparently unaware of this memo, Roosevelt ultimately made a secret agreement with Stalin (Churchill was not informed), conceding these territorial demands, as well as giving Moscow rights to the main Manchurian railroad and territory in northern China.[293] U.S. Ambassador to China Patrick J. Hurley resigned in protest,[294] alleging the existence of a "Communist conspiracy within the State Department."[295]

Hiss would later deny under oath any role in China policy at Yalta, or in the subsequent State Department proclamation calling for "peace and unity with the Communists in China," saying "It was not in my area of activity at all." Hiss admitted that he "had been connected with far eastern affairs before," but protested that after "about February 1944 [a year before he "stressed the importance" of unity with the Communists], I was assigned to United Nations work and specialized entirely in that field thereafter."[296]

Other secret agreements

According to James F. Byrnes, then director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, he and others returned from Yalta to Washington on February 10, but Roosevelt stayed behind with a select few—including Hiss:

“

We expected the conference would end that evening and that the President would leave the following day. But that afternoon Stalin requested the President to remain one more day. He said they could not conclude their work and he wished to discuss some matter he deemed important. The President complied.... [T]he protocols... were signed on February 11.

When the President returned, he did not mention it to me and the protocol was kept locked in his safe at the White House.

”

Only after Roosevelt's death would Byrnes, by then Secretary of State, learn—due to "a news story from Moscow," he wrote—of "the full agreement."[297]

The Yalta Agreement … represented, in two of its features, the endorsement by the United States of the principle of human slavery. One of these features was the recognition that German labor could be used as a source of reparations … And the agreement that Soviet citizens who were found in the Eastern zones of occupation should be handed over to Soviet authorities amounted, for the many Soviet refugees who did not wish to return, to the enactment of a fugitive slave law.[300]

”

Asked if he had "drafted or participated in the drafting" of parts of the Yalta agreement, Hiss would testify, "I think it is accurate and not an immodest statement to say that I did to some extent, yes."[301]

According to data from Vadim the group of agents of the "military" neighbors whose part Ruble was earlier, recently was decorated with orders of the USSR. Ruble learned about this fact from his friend Ales, who is the head of the mentioned group.[305]

”

This memo apparently refers to Venonadecrypt 1822, dated March 30, 1945, in which "Vadim" (Anatoly Gorsky) reports,[306] following up on a conversation with "Ales," that "Ales has been working with the neighbors [GRU][307] continuously since 1935"; that for "a few years now he has been the director of a small group of probationers [agents][308] of the neighbors for the most part drawn from his relatives";[309] that recently, "Ales and his whole group were awarded Soviet medals"; and that after "the Yalta conference, back in Moscow, one very high-ranking Soviet worker allegedly had contact with Ales (Ales implied that it was Comrade Vyshinskii) and at the request of the military neighbors he conveyed to him their thanks, etc." Regarding "Ales," one FBI memo reports:

“

It would appear likely that this individual is Alger Hiss in view of the fact that he was in the State Department and the information from Chambers indicated that his wife, Priscilla, was active in Soviet espionage and he also had a brother, Donald, in the State Department. It also is to be noted that Hiss did attend the Yalta conference as a special adviser to President Roosevelt, and he would, of course, have conferred with high officials of other nations attending the conference.[310]

The name "Alger Hiss" in English, from Vassiliev's notes on Perlo's March 15, 1945 list to Moscow Center. Image courtesy Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

On March 15, Victor Perlo (code-named "Raid") gave Moscow (in English) a list of people not in his "Perlo group" whom he knew worked with Soviet intelligence. Included on that list was the name "Alger Hiss."[314] Five days later, State Department security officer Raymond Murphy interviewed Chambers. Murphy's notes record that Chambers reiterated his identification of Hiss as a member of the Communist Party underground apparatus, but added that he was also the leader of a cell and not merely a Communist but, said Chambers, an agent of influence who sought to shape U.S. policy "in keeping with the desires of the Communist Party," as well as an espionage agent who "disclosed much confidential matter."[315]

On March 24, FBI agent E.A. Tamm, assistant to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, alerted Robert Lynch, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, to Chambers' allegations that Hiss had been a member of the underground organization of the Communist Party, and to Hiss's links to Nathan Witt and Lee Pressman. After interviewing Hiss the next day,[316] FBI official D.M. Ladd furnished Frederick B. Lyon, Chief of the State Department Division of Foreign Activity Correlation, a summary memorandum outlining this information.[317] On March 26, State Department security officer Robert Bannerman sent Donald Russell, Assistant Secretary of State for Administration, a comprehensive secret report on Chambers' allegations regarding Hiss, recommending "that immediate action be taken to terminate Mr. Hiss's services with the Department."[318]

United Nations

Secretary General Alger Hiss presides over the UN Charter Conference, 1945. At his right, Molotov

Even as the Soviets were decorating "Ales", Hiss was promoted to become Director of the State Department Office of Special Political Affairs. Shortly thereafter, he was named Secretary-General[319] of the upcoming United Nations Charter Conference in San Francisco. "As Secretary-General, managing the agenda," reported Time, Hiss "will have a lot to say behind the scenes about who gets the breaks."

On March 19, "Wild Bill" Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA), offered Stettinius the services of OSS foreign experts to prepare research studies "on all personnel concerned" in the conference. According to Stettinius, Hiss "strongly opposed" this proposal, and "vigorously endorsed" the view that OSS "doing espionage work" at the conference would "seriously embarrass us." As a result, "American intelligence work at the conference was sharply limited."[320]

Meanwhile, "Vadim" (Gorsky)[321] wanted to meet with "Ales" at the conference, according to a cable Vassiliev discovered in the Soviet archives. His notes indicate that "Ales" had worked with "Ruble" (Harold Glasser) as a member of a group run by "Karl" (Whittaker Chambers).[322] The cable adds that "'Ruble' gives 'Ales' an exceptionally good political reference as a member of the Comparty.... completely aware that he is Communist in an illegal position, with all the ensuing consequences," and recommends (according to the notes) that he be approached at the UN conference by "Sergei" (NKVD agent Vladimir Pravdin,[323] then under cover as New York bureau chief of the Soviet news agency TASS)[324] or Gorsky, "alluding either to the password, or to 'Ruble', or simply to 'Ales's' progressive attitudes."

Hiss arrives in Washington from San Francisco with UN Charter in fireproof safe with parachute. Image courtesy United States Air Force

In April 1945, at the UN conference, Glasser slipped Gorsky a warning that the FBI had notified Stettinius that Bureau surveillance had followed a bundle of State Department documents from Washington to New York, where they were photographed, then returned within 24 hours to Washington. Only three people had access to these documents, one of whom was "Ales." Stettinius told "Ales": "I hope it is not you."[325]

After the conference, Stettinius resigned to become the first U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. His successor as Secretary of State, James Byrnes, was immediately "faced with the problem of what he would do with Alger."[326] Byrnes had been "pushed out" of planning the UN conference, according to Stettinius, after FDR had signaled "that Alger Hiss and I should handle this entirely ourselves."[327]

Hoping to obtain "control of the entire Mediterranean," the Soviets forced through a UN resolution demanding "an immediate boycott" of Spain. But as it gradually became clear that the Soviets were seeking "Communist expansion world-wide," the US sought the reversal of this UN resolution. According to William B. Dunham of the State Department's Office of Western European Affairs:[331]

“

[I]n the State Department... many, especially in the Bureau of UN Affairs.... took every opportunity, tried every dodge, to oppose or at least obstruct as best they could... reversing the UN resolution.... Deputy Assistant Secretary for UN Affairs, Alger Hiss... led the obstructionists there.[332]

”

According to a State Department internal security probe of Hiss ordered by Byrnes (and made public in 1993),[333] in February 1945, Hiss requested top-secret files from the OSS on British, Soviet, French and Chinese internal security policies, as well as Far East policy.[334] FBI surveillance at this time found that Hiss also developed "a keen interest in atomic energy" and other matters relating to military intelligence[335]—all of which were well outside the purview of his office.[336] This finding was congruent with a Venona cable dated the following month, in which Gorsky reported that "Ales" and his group were "working on obtaining only military information," since Soviet military intelligence "allegedly are not very interested" in "materials about the Bank [United States Department of State]."[337] Loy Henderson, director of the State Department Office of Near East Affairs (NEA), quietly ordered members of NEA to keep confidential materials and information from Hiss.[338]

Defections and Investigations

Igor Gouzenko

On September 5, 1945, GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, telling the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that one Lt. Kulakov in the office of the Soviet military attaché told him that he had learned in Moscow prior to his departure in May 1945 that an assistant to then U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius was a Soviet spy.[341] Stettinius' aide at the time was Alger Hiss.[342]

Two days later, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King wrote that acting under-secretary of state for external affairs Norman Robertson told him that Gouzenko’s documents disclosed that “everything was much worse than we would have believed…. Stettinius [had] been surrounded by spies, etc., and the Russian Government [had] been kept informed of all that was being done from that source...”[343]

Also that day, Hiss made an extraordinary proposal that the State Department create a new post, that of "special assistant for military affairs," linked to his Office of Special Political Affairs,[346] thus giving Hiss access to information regarding atomic energy, arms procurement and military intelligence.[347] Hiss also proposed a State Department reorganization scheme, under which, wrote Panuch, Hiss would acquire "working control" over the flow of papers within the department. "If this ambitious project should be approved," warned Panuch, "the Hiss group will have achieved infiltration in, or control of" what he identified as "critically strategic points" within State.[348]

Following up on Gouzenko's revelations, Raymond Murphy of the State Department again interviewed Chambers, who repeated that Hiss's assignment was "to mess up policy." On September 25, Walter Winchell again broached the subject on his broadcast, reporting, "It can be categorically stated that the question of the loyalty and integrity of one high American official has been called to the attention of the President."[349]

Elizabeth Bentley

In November 1945, Father Charles F. Cronin, a priest instructed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to prepare a study of the spread of Communism in the United States,[350] reported, "In the State Department, the most influential Communist has been Alger Hiss."[351]
On November 27, the FBI disseminated a secret report to the State Department, the Attorney General, and the Truman White House, reporting Chambers' identification of Hiss as a secret member of the Communist underground apparatus in contact with the Ware group.[352] Three days later, defecting Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley advised FBI investigators that Victor Perlo told her that Harold Glasser had been taken away from the “Perlo group” and turned over to a Russian “by some American in some governmental agency in Washington.”[353]

Alger Hiss and Harold Glasser were awarded the Order of the Red Star for their loyalty to the Soviet Union.

Bentley's unlikely account was corroborated by the previously-cited April 25, 1945 memo from Pavel Fitin, head of NKVD foreign intelligence, to NKVD Chief Vsevolod Merkulov, noting that Glasser had worked for both the NKVD and GRU:

“

Our agent RUBLE, drawn to work for the Soviet Union in May 1937, passed initially through the military "neighbors" and then through our station (NKVD) valuable information on political and economic issues.[354]

”

Bentley said that Charles Kramer (who would be identified by both Lee Pressman and Nathaniel Weyl as a member of the Ware group) told her that the person who had done this “was named Hiss and that he was in the U.S. State Department.”[355] She said after "Jack" (Soviet agent Joseph Katz)[356] asked her who Hiss was, she clipped an article in which Hiss was mentioned from the New York daily PM, whose Washington correspondent, I.F. Stone, was (according to Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB operations in the United States) a fellow traveler[357] who cooperated with Soviet intelligence as an "agent of influence."[358] Bentley said “It is my present recollection that this newspaper article stated Hiss’ full name was Eugene [sic] Hiss and that he was an adviser to Dean Acheson in the State Department.”[359] FBI investigation quickly closed in on Alger Hiss.[360] This was consistent with the above-cited March 5, 1945 cable,[361] in which Gorsky reports: "‘Ales’ and ‘Ruble’ [Harold Glasser][362] used to work in ‘Karl’s’ (Whittaker Chambers)[363] informational group, which was affiliated with the neighbors [GRU]."[364] Before the end of 1945, a State Department Security memorandum summarized:

“

Bentley advised that members of this group had told her that Hiss of the State Department had taken Harold Glasser of the Treasury Department, and 2 or 3 others, and had turned them over to direct control by the Soviet representatives in this country. In this regard, attention is directed to Whittaker Chambers' statement regarding Alger Hiss and to the statement by Gouzenko, regarding an assistant to the Secretary of State who was a Soviet agent.[365]

”

Investigations

On February 9, 1946, Stalin declared that war was inevitable as long as capitalism existed, in a speech regarded by some as the open declaration of Cold War.[366] Two days later, ex-Communist Benjamin Mandel, former manager of the Daily Worker,[367] identified Alger Hiss to the FBI as "a Communist Party member," and one of a "high level group of government employees who would not be found openly connected with the Party or with any Front organizations and who were specifically instructed not to display such connections."[368] The Bureau again interviewed Hiss, who denied ever being a Communist, and denied knowledge of any of his friends being Communists. He did, however, add that he had heard it said that Lee Pressman was either a Party member or followed the Party line.[369]

Secretary of State Byrnes took seriously warnings from State Department security and the FBI that evidence existed suggesting that Hiss might be a security risk.[370] By that spring, Byrnes was persuaded that Hiss was working for the Communist Party. An FBI memo of March 14 relates a report that Byrnes "stated that HISS is to be given no further consideration for promotion or assignment to responsible duties in the Department," and that he wanted to know whether Hiss could be "dismissed summarily," adding, "Secretary BYRNES is of the definite opinion that ALGER HISS should be disposed of..."[371]

On May 15, the State Department prepared a Top Secret chart identifying 124 loyalty or security cases on the department payroll, broken down into categories: 77 "suspects," another 13 "Communists," an additional 14 "sympathizers," and, most ominously, a further 20 personnel identified as "agents"—one of whom was Alger Hiss. Two weeks later, FBI Special Agent Mickey Ladd reported to Director Hoover that Panuch reported to the bureau that Alger Hiss was part of “an enormous espionage ring in Washington” working for the Soviets.[372] On July 26, Secretary of State Byrnes wrote to Congressman Adolph J. Sabath (D-Ill.) that security screeners had identified 284 State Department employees as unfit for permanent employent; he added that 79 of these had since left the department[373]—leaving 205 still on the payroll. On August 3, State Department official Samuel Klaus prepared a 106-page confidential memo summarizing security data on each of the cases listed on the May 15 chart.[374]

That year, British intelligence supplied its order of battle against Soviet-led guerrillas in Greece to the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, this top-secret information appeared in the column of Drew Pearson[375] (whose reporter, David Karr, was a "competent KGB source"),[376] forcing the British army to withdraw, a move that would have delivered Greece to the Kremlin had not the U.S. intervened. According to de Toledano, “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State J. Anthony Panuch, in charge of security, tracked down the source of the leak. He discovered that Hiss had asked the Pentagon for this information, though it had nothing to do with his work as director of the Office of Special Political Affairs.” For his diligence, Panuch would be forced out of the State Department by Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson.[377]

State Department security officers discovered that Hiss's desk calendar for September 14, 1946, recorded a meeting Hiss did not schedule through the department (and for which he made no official record) with "McLean [sic], British Emb."[378] Donald Maclean[379] was a diplomat at the British Embassy in Washington who was also a Soviet agent[380] and member of the Cambridge spy ring. He would defect in 1951 to the Soviet Union,[381] where he would be rewarded with the rank of Colonel in the KGB.[382] Another member of that ring, Kim Philby, would likewise defect to Moscow, later writing in his memoir, "it was also the era of Hiss, Coplon,[383]Fuchs,[384]Gold,[385]Greenglass,[386] and the braveRosenbergs[387]—not to mention others who are still nameless."[388]

That year, over strenuous objections on national-security grounds from the State Department's Office of American Republics Affairs (and the government of Panama), the U.S. government reported to the United Nations on the Panama Canal Zone as "occupied territory," a propaganda coup for the Soviets. According to Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Spruille Braden:

“

We then tried to run it down, and we found that this report had been submitted and the employment of the words "occupied territory" by the Office of Special Political Affairs, that is to say, Mr. Alger Hiss.[389]

”

Secretary of State James Byrnes told the FBI he would have fired Hiss, but for the mandatory Civil Service Commission hearing, which would have revealed confidential sources on the case.[390]

In November 1946, the Bureau disseminated to the State Department, Attorney General and Truman White House yet another secret report, this time reporting Bentley's allegations regarding "Eugene Hiss," suggesting that this might actually be a reference to Alger Hiss.[391] Hoover asked President Truman for permission to take action against Hiss, but Truman (according to a former chief of CIASoviet bloc counterintelligence)[392] remained "stubbornly antagonistic" to the allegations.[393]

That month, for the first time since the elections of 1928, the Republicans had won control of both houses of Congress, in a campaign charging the Democrats with being "soft on Communism." During the campaign, House Republican leader Joe Martin pledged, "first we will give our efforts to cleaning out the Communists, their fellow travelers and parlor pinks from high positions in our Government." "More than one Congressman," reported The Christian Science Monitor, "whenever the subject of leftist activity in the State Department is mentioned, pulled out a list of suspects that was invariably headed by Mr. Hiss."[394] This congressional interest finally forced the Democratic Truman administration to act: the State Department removed Hiss from access to secrets,[395] while the Justice Department planned a grand jury to look into Soviet espionage.

Two weeks after the election, Truman established the President's Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty, to determine federal loyalty standards and establish procedures to remove or disqualify "any disloyal or subversive person" from federal service. Truman's actions "left both contemporary observers and historians with the conviction that he acted primarily to preempt further moves on the loyalty issue from the incoming Republican Congress," according to the journal of the National Archives. "Truman's concern about 'subversive' infiltration of the government was likely more political than substantive."

Even before the grand jury convened, the FBI learned that the Truman administration, acutely aware that "an untimely public disclosure about Hiss could easily have torpedoed Truman's hopes for the 1948 Presidential election,"[401] conspired to subvert the grand jury process in order to cover up the Soviet penetration problem.[402] The grand jury sat for nearly a year (July 22, 1947 to July 20, 1948), during which the Justice Department never called Whittaker Chambers to testify. Without his testimony, the grand jury had no corroboration of Bentley. As a result, it did not indict a single federal official for espionage; instead, Truman Justice obtained indictments of the open leaders of the above-ground Communist Party—not for espionage, but for violations of the Smith Act.[403]

The Republican Congress responded by opening its own investigation of espionage suspects including Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White and Hiss. The Democrat Truman stonewalled, issuing a Presidential Directive that cut Congress off from all access to FBI and other information on loyalty or security cases:

"Any subpena or demand or request for information, reports, or files of the nature described, received from sources other than those persons in the executive branch of the Government... shall be respectfully declined..."[404]

I was a member of the Communist Party and a paid functionary of the party.... the apparatus to which I was attached…. was an underground organization of the United States Communist Party developed, to the best of my knowledge, by Harold Ware…. The head of the underground group at the time I knew it was Nathan Witt…. Later, John Abt became the leader. Lee Pressman was also a member of this group, as was Alger Hiss….The purpose of this group at that time was not primarily espionage. Its original purpose was the Communist infiltration of the American Government. But espionage was certainly one of its eventual objectives.[405]

When Chambers testified against Hiss, wrote Sudoplatov, "we considered this to be a setback for GRU intelligence activities in the United States."[406] Four months later, Anatoly Gorsky, chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S. during World War II, would author an internal Soviet secret police memorandum, entitled "Failures in the USA (1938-48)," listing 43 Soviet sources and intelligence officers likely to have been identified to U.S. authorities. Included on the list, under the heading, "'Karl’s' group," was "Alger Hiss, former employee of the State Dept."[407] That same month, Piotr Fedotov and Konstantin Kukin, two other senior Soviet intelligence officials, reported to the chairman of Soviet intelligence about “our former agents who were betrayed by Chambers (A. Hiss, D. Hiss, Wadleigh, Pigman, Reno).”[408]

Two days after Chambers, Hiss testified, denying that he ever even knew Chambers, in a statement Secretary of State Dean Acheson helped write.[409] Hiss "asked the committee to disregard the evidence and follow its emotions":

“

it is inconceivable that there could have been on my part, during fifteen years or more in public office… any departure from the highest rectitude without its being known. It is inconceivable that the men with whom I was intimately associated during those fifteen years should not know my true character better than this accuser. It is inconceivable that… [etc.][410] (Emphases Bagley's)[411]

”

The day of Hiss's testimony, President Truman finally reviewed Hiss's FBI file. Pronouncing Hiss “guilty as hell,” Truman told White House Special Counsel Samuel Rosenman, “We shouldn't just indict this son of a bitch. We should hang him.” Five minutes later, Truman blustered to a press conference that the Hiss case was just an election-year “redherring,”[412] a characterization he would repeat as late as 1956. When Rosenman later asked why he had lied, Truman explained, “You don't understand. The Republicans aren't after Alger Hiss. They're after me. I had to take the political view.”[413] (That year, Truman told Secretary of Defense James Forrestal there were "too many unknowns" in the partially decoded Venona messages,[414] saying, "Even if part of this is true, it would open up the whole red panic again.")[415] In her newspaper column, Eleanor Roosevelt set the tone of respectable opinion, writing, "Smearing good people like Lauchlin Currie, Alger Hiss and others is, I think, unforgiveable.... Anyone knowing either Mr. Currie or Mr. Hiss, who are the two people whom I happen to know fairly well, would not need any denial on their part to know they are not Communists. Their records prove it."[416]

When Hiss testified, most of those watching, including members of the press, appeared to be on Hiss's side, even giving him a round of applause when he finished. So strong was Hiss's denial that the committee wanted to drop the investigation.[417] But one member, freshman Congressman Richard M. Nixon (R-Calif.) insisted that either Chambers or Hiss was lying about whether they had known one another; he asked the committee to appoint him to head a subcommittee to find out which one.[418] The Truman administration fixed its sights, not on Hiss, but on Chambers, Truman aide George Elsie advising White House Counsel Clark Clifford on August 16, "Justice should make every effort to ascertain if Whittaker Chambers is guilty of perjury."[419] No suggestion was made that Justice make any effort at all to ascertain if Hiss might be guilty of perjury.

The Hiss forces launched a "frightful campaign of vilification"[420] against Chambers, a whispering campaign of lies and innuendos. Many editorialists and columnists violently attacked him and defended Hiss.[421]

Nixon brought Hiss face-to-face with his accuser on August 25. "Hiss stoutly continued to deny the charge," reported Time, but "it was clear to everyone" that he and Chambers "had known each other quite well in the mid-'30s." The magazine added that Hiss's "favorite phrase, as he fenced tediously with the committee, was: 'To the best of my recollection.' He used it and similar phrases 198 times." Chambers offered to take a lie-detector test; Hiss refused—a refusal he kept up for the rest of his life.

Trying to explain Chambers' charges, Hiss suggested that his accuser was crazy, asking, "is he a man of consistent reliability, truthfulness and honor?... Indeed, is he a man of sanity?"[422] He demanded that the committee ask his accuser if he had ever been treated for a mental illness. The committee obliged, and Chambers answered: "I have not, period." On the White House memo advising that Chambers be investigated for perjury was inserted a handwritten line: "Investigation of Chambers' confinement in mental institution."[423] (Again, no suggestion was made that Hiss's mental health history might be subject to investigation.) The FBI had already checked into this, and Hoover had reported to Attorney GeneralTom Clark, "With regard to Whittaker Chambers, there is nothing indicated in the files of the Bureau, or in the files of the New York office that Chambers has been institutionalized."[424] In falling for the fiction that Chambers had been committed to an insane asylum, the Truman administration was "taken in by disinformation being spread by the American Communist party and Alger Hiss's partisans."[425]

In an act of supreme hubris, Hiss dared Chambers to repeat his charges outside of the immunity afforded in congressional hearings, so Hiss could sue him, taunting, "and I hope you will do it damned quickly." Just two days after their public testimony,[426] Chambers called Hiss's bluff on NBC's Meet the Press, saying, "Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now."

Embarrassment mounted among Hiss partisans as weeks dragged by with no suit filed.[427] The New York Daily News asked, "Well Alger, where's that suit?"[428] Even the Washington Post—"the most implacable of the pro-Hiss newspapers," according to Chambers[429]—began to have doubts,[430] writing:

“

As yet, no formal action to initiate a suit for slander has publicly been taken by Mr. Hiss ... Mr. Hiss himself has created a situation in which he is obliged to put up or shut up ... Mr. Hiss has left himself no alternative. And each day of delay in making it known that he will avail himself of the opportunity Mr. Chambers has accorded him does incalculable damage to his reputation.[431]

”

Finally, after a month, Hiss filed his long-threatened slander suit against Chambers.

Hiss's suit against Chambers

The Baltimore Documents

In a pre-trial "discovery" deposition for the suit, Hiss's attorney William L. Marbury asked Chambers if he had "any correspondence, either typewritten or in handwriting" from Hiss—"one of the most disastrous questions ever asked at a deposition."[432] Marbury "never expected (nor would he have asked for, had he known) the response that he received." Chambers retrieved the packet he had given his wife's nephew in 1938, which had been hidden in a dumbwaiter shaft. Three days later, Chambers turned over to Hiss's attorneys 65 pages of typewritten documents and handwritten memoranda, some so sensitive that for security reasons they could not safely be made public, though already a decade old. Chambers' attorney introduced the documents:

“

Let's identify these papers by reading the first and last words of each one into the record... 'Tokyo... February 12, KENNEDY.' 'Paris... February 15, 1938... Secretary of State... Signed BULLITT.' 'Vienna... February 13, 1938... Secretary of State... Signed WILEY.' 'Rome... March 29... The Embassy learns... Signed PHILLIPS.' 'Warsaw... March 29... I learn following in strictest confidence... Signed BIDDLE.'[433]

”

Hiss conceded that the typed pages appeared to be copies of authentic State Department documents, and admitted that all but one of the handwritten memos appeared to be in his handwriting.[434] Among the documents confirmed by Hiss's own documents experts to be in his handwriting (contradicting his denial) was a summary of a telegram[435] that Chambers had quoted almost verbatim in an article he gave Herbert Solow in 1938.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas J. Donegan told the FBI that Assistant Attorney General Alexander M. Campbell, head of the Criminal Division at Truman Justice, “now wants to institute perjury charges against Chambers” for not revealing the documents before this. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's handwritten addendum comments, “I wonder why they don't move against Hiss also.”[436] The Truman administration's determination to indict Chambers rather than Hiss was unusual, as two leading scholars of the case note:

“

Usually … when a witness gives false testimony and then later comes forward and provides a truthful account, no perjury charge is brought. To charge perjury … in such a case would be a disincentive for a witness to provide a subsequent truthful account…. [A] perjury count is rarely brought if a witness corrects false testimony in a timely fashion…. Chambers corrected his false sworn testimony within two months of his grand jury testimony ... and his false testimony had not produced any miscarriage of justice.[437]

”

The Pumpkin Papers

One of the 'pumpkin papers,' marked 'STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL FOR THE SECRETARY.' Bullitt relates to Hull report of Litvinov's private comments on Soviet intentions regarding war with Japan, 1938. Image courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Hoping that they would lead to an indictment of Chambers,[438] Hiss turned over the documents to the TrumanJustice Department, which immediately impounded and sequestered them. HUAC requested copies, but Truman stonewalled. On December 1, the United Press reported, "the Justice Department is about ready to drop its investigation of the celebrated Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers controversy."[439] The Truman administration may have thought it was done with Hiss, but it wasn't quite finished with Chambers. The next day, an FBI memo reiterated that Justice wanted "an immediate investigation by the Bureau to determine whether Chambers committed perjury."[440] Hoover penned, "I can't understand why such effort is being made to indict Chambers to the exclusion of Hiss."[441]

Meanwhile, rebuffed in his attempts to see the documents, Nixon asked Chambers on December 1 whether he had any other such material in his possession. The answer was yes. The next day, in response to a subpoena, Chambers led HUAC chief investigator Robert Stripling on his Maryland farm to a pumpkin he had hollowed out the night before and in which he had secreted five rolls (two developed strips and three undeveloped rolls, one of which later proved to have been light struck) of 35 millimeter film. The film included fifty-eight frames, mostly photos of State and Navy Department documents, dated January 5 through April 1, 1938 (the so-called "Pumpkin Papers").[442] The State Department documents dealt with a widevariety of subjects, including U.S. intentions with respect to the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, and Germany's takeover of Austria. Some of the documents on the film were initialed by Hiss and came from his office. Some were of a highly sensitive, classified nature. Some State Department cables bearing Hiss's handwritten initials had direct bearing on matters of major Soviet interest, including Chinese Communist strategy during the war with Japan and Chinese-Soviet relations.[443]

According to Chambers, some of the microfilm was made by a contact he knew only as "Felix," who would photograph documents with a Leica purchased by the Communist underground. For such work, said Chambers, Felix had been trained in Moscow, where he traveled on a forged U.S. passport. In 1949 Chambers would lead FBI investigators to the Baltimore block on which he thought Felix had lived in the 1930s. The Bureau discovered that a Felix Inslerman had lived on the block, later moving to Schenectady, N.Y., where he worked on a secret guided-missile project, in 1946 becoming one of the few civilians to attend the atomic tests at Bikini.

Both before the grand jury and in the second Hiss trial, Inslerman would refuse to answer questions on grounds of potential self-incrimination. But in Inslerman's Schenectady home, the FBI found a Leica whose imperfections matched the scratch marks on Chambers' famed pumpkin film. In 1954, Inslerman would corroborate Chambers' story under oath. He would later turn up on the "Gorsky memo" (code-named 107th), as would another photographer identified by Chambers, "David Carpenter" (David Zimmerman),[444] code-named 103rd.[445] Recently released files reveal that the third photographer identified by Chambers,[446] ex-GRU agent[447] William Edward Crane admitted to the FBI that he photographed documents from the Treasury and State Department for Chambers in Baltimore.[448]

Grand jury

The Truman administration demanded that HUAC turn over the film, but Nixon refused. He allowed Justice Department officials to view the film, and gave them copies, but would not surrender the film until Justice supplied HUAC with copies of the sequestered Baltimore documents. With no other option, Truman Justice finally called Chambers to testify before a hastily-reconvened grand jury on December 6—more than 16 months after it had originally convened. That day, Hiss's attorney Edward McLean gave the defense's documents examiner, J. Howard Haring, a batch of old Hiss family letters that Hiss had given him the previous September, two months before Chambers produced the documents. Immediately identifying the typeface as that of a Woodstock typewriter, Haring reported that one of Mrs. Hiss's 1933 letters "was typed on the same machine as the Chambers documents." McLean informed the Hisses of this finding the same day. The next day, according to another of Hiss's lawyers, John F. Davis: "Alger ... asked [me to] check on an old machine which he remembers he gave to Pat, the son of Claudia Catlett...." Yet Hiss swore under oath that he remembered neither the make nor disposition of the typewriter. While the FBI was off on a wild-goose chase searching used-typewriter stores, on the basis of false information furnished by Hiss,[449] his brother Donald tracked down the Catletts and retrieved the typewriter.

Hiss would later change his story, testifying that he gave the typewriter to the Catletts in 1937, before the date of the documents produced by Chambers. Pat Catlett, however, would tell defense lawyers that Hiss gave the Catletts the typewriter in the spring of 1938, just after the dates of the documents.

On December 13, the FBI independently located specimens of Priscilla Hiss's typing from the 1930s. The FBI laboratory concluded, like Haring, that all the papers in question had been typed on the same typewriter, a Woodstock.

Another defense expert, Harry E. Cassidy, concluded that Priscilla Hiss not only typed the Chambers documents, but wrote all the handwritten corrections on the typed documents. Asked by Hiss's attorneys whether it was more likely that Hiss or Chambers had written these corrections, Haring responded: "I am inclined to the opinion that the AH [Alger Hiss] corrections more closely resemble the QUESTIONED writing, than do the writings of WC [Whittaker Chambers]." A third defense expert, Edwin Fearon, agreed, reporting to the Hiss lawyers: "The corrections appearing in Exhibits 5-47 inclusive (exception—Exhibit 10) bear a closer resemblence [sic] to the handwritten corrections made by AH than to those made by WC." Fearon added that all but one of the documents were "typed on Woodstock typewriter no.N230099"—the Hiss's machine.

On December 15, Alger Hiss proposed to the grand jury a theory that someone (perhaps Chambers)[450] had sneaked into the State Department and stolen the documents from his desk[451] then, having somehow obtained access to Hiss's typewriter,[452] typed some of the documents on it[453] and microfilmed others, and then sneaked back into the State Department and replaced the originals,[454] all in an elaborate plot to frame Hiss[455] a decade later.[456] Even Hiss admitted that his theory was "fantastic,"[457] stating, "Until the day I die, I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter," a statement provoking outright laughter among jurors.[458]

That day, Hiss testified that he never gave any documents to Whittaker Chambers, and that he had no contact with Chambers after January 1, 1937. The same day, the grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury, charging that he lied under oath in both these statements. Because the five-year statute of limitations had expired, the grand jury could not consider espionage charges.

The Trials

On May 31, 1949, Alger Hiss went on trial for perjury in New York City. At trial, Hiss provided an all-star cast of character witnesses, including such notables as Adlai Stevenson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. However, both Under Secretary Welles and Sayre testified that delivering the classified documents to a foreign power would enable them to break America's most secret codes.[464]

At Hiss’ first perjury trial, Hornbeck testified that an unnamed friend had warned him that Hiss was a Communist fellow-traveler, but he disregarded the warning.[465] At the second trial, Hornbeck testified that on at least two occasions he was warned that Hiss was a Communist, and named Bullitt as his source.[466]John Foster Dulles, who had recommended Hiss for the Carnegie Endowment, likewise testified at that trial that various people had warned him that Hiss was a Communist.[467]

Hiss’ attorney conceded that the stolen documents had been copied on Hiss's Woodstock, telling the jury the question was not “what typewriter was used, but who the typist was.”[468]

The defense reverted to Hiss's original "insanity defense" (to wit, that Chambers was insane), calling a psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Binger, who attempted to psychoanalyze Chambers without interviewing him, testifying that “Mr. Chambers is suffering from a condition known as a psychopathic personality.”[469] So thoroughly did his testimony collapse under scrutiny that the prosecutor’s cross examination of Binger has been used as a model[470] to teach generations of law students.[471]

Among the symptoms of psychopathic personality, Binger mentioned “abnormal sexuality.” An important part of the Hiss defense strategy was to exploit Chambers’ sexual orientation in order to portray him as mentally ill and therefore not a credible witness: Hiss himself dictated for the record a rumor that Chambers had been treated in 1938 “for gonorrhea, frigidity, shock, and persecution complex.”[472] Writing in Oxford University's Oxonian Review, professed "liberal" Daniel Hemel sums up:

“

[W]hat is striking about the Hiss trial is not that the prosecution engaged in shameless red-baiting (it did not), but that Hiss’s defense team engaged in shameless gay-baiting. Unable to discredit Chambers based on the facts of the case, Hiss’s lawyers (with the defendant’s encouragement) sought to smear Chambers based on the fact that he was bisexual. Fortunately, the jurors in the Hiss case were not as horrifyingly homophobic as Hiss and his attorneys. In retrospect, if either side of the trial engaged in egregious behaviour, it was the defense—not the prosecution.

”

Hiss's friend and former colleague, Charles Wyzanski, Senior District Judge of the U.S. District Court in Boston, testified in both trials in defense of Hiss. Wyzanski, who "initially had supposed [Hiss] innocent," (Italics in original) later concluded that "Hiss was guilty," as did Hiss's own attorney, William L. Marbury.

Hiss was sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms in federal prison. Secretary of State Dean Acheson provoked outrage by commenting, "Whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyer may take, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss."[477] Eleanor Roosevelt added to the furor with her comment, "It seems rather horrible to condemn someone on the word of someone else who admits to guilt." Time magazine commented that she "obviously had not been paying much attention," being "unaware of, or determined to ignore, the corroborating evidence introduced by the Government."

By that June, the U.S. Army was persuaded that Ales was Hiss. General of the Army Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed President Truman that Venona had "positively identified" Hiss and Harry Dexter White as Soviet agents.[478] According to Bradley, Truman said, "That G—D— stuff. Every time it bumps into us it gets bigger and bigger. It's likely to take us down."

Prison

Hiss served 44 months of his five-year sentence in Lewisburg Federal Prison. There, his best friends were the gangsters, whom he later compared to prisoners of war in terms of solidarity, hierarchy and discipline.[483] Hiss even provided legal advice to his fellow inmate, the notorious Mafia boss Frank Costello.[484] Hiss called the gangsters “the most stable group in any prison” and “the healthiest inmates of the prison” because they “had absolutely no sense of guilt.”[485] Hiss admitted that he, too, never felt guilt about anything he had ever done[486] —as one Hiss biographer comments, “an incredible statement from anyone.” Among Hiss's fellow prisoners was avowed Communist Maurice Braverman. According to leftist historian Garry Wills:

“

[W]hen it came time for Hiss to be released, Braverman's lawyer said that the Party hoped he would have an eloquent statement to read when he came out the gate. Television cameras were bound to be there. Braverman asked Hiss what he meant to say; Hiss said he had not thought of making a statement. Braverman said he thought it would be a good idea. "What should I say?" Hiss asked, and Braverman composed his first draft for him. He behaved like one still serving the Party.[487]

[The] Attack on you shows how deeply the enemy fears you as he always fears and seeks to destroy a combination of honesty and fighting courage. Be proud to be attacked for the attackers are the enemies of all of us. To few recent public figures does this nation owe so much as to you. God help us if we ever forget it.

”

Nixon was elected President in 1968, and re-elected in a landslide[491] in 1972. But the left "loathed Nixon for his role in the Hiss case" (and in Vietnam).[492] By 1974, the Watergate scandal[493] forced President Nixon to resign,[494] giving "some credence to a wide spectrum of conspiracy theories[495] involving fake typewriters, phony microfilm, and various collusions among the FBI, Nixon, HUAC, the CIA, the radical right, and the KGB." In 1975, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court granted Hiss's petition for readmittance to the State Bar of Massachusetts, although the court's ruling stated "nothing we have said here should be construed as detracting one iota from the fact that in considering Hiss's petition we consider him to be guilty as charged."

With the rise of radical left-wing politics and the so-called New Left in the '60s, Hiss became a sought-out speaker on college campuses.[496] In 1981, Bard College established an Alger Hiss Distinguished Professorship in Social Studies, formerly held by "eco-socialist"[497] Joel Kovel, who declared that America's obsession with anti-Communism during the Cold War led the U.S. to become “the enemy of humanity.” By the time Nixon died in 1994, Foreign Policy magazine could assign the task of reviewing his posthumous book, Beyond Peace, to his embittered foe, George McGovern, who took the opportunity to avenge his humiliating 49-state landslide defeat by Nixon, writing (without explanation), "The evidence that Hiss was a security risk to the United States simply is not convincing," labeling Hiss's conviction "dubious," and suggesting that Nixon's "prosecution of Alger Hiss probably belongs on the same level" as "political demagoguery of the worst sort—unscrupulous attacks on the patriotism of deeply devoted public servants of the first rank."[498]

Death

The tide turned against Hiss in 1978, with the publication of Allan Weinstein's Perjury, which shifted the scholarly consensus to acceptance of Hiss's guilt.[499] This consensus was strengthened by the October 1996[500] release by the CIA and NSA of the Venona decrypts, including the "Ales" transmission of March 30, 1945.[501] The following month, on November 15, 1996, Alger Hiss died. According to professor emeritus John V. Fleming of Princeton, "Hiss continued to lie until his dying day." By then, "just about everyone conceded that he was guilty," reported the left-liberal Salon.com, "that the brilliant, suave, well-educated, well-connected lawyer-diplomat had indeed been a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and '40s." Further confirmation came in 2009, when the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars posted Vassiliev's notebooks online.[502]

↑For an overview of these (mutually-contradictory) conspiracy theories see the appendix, "Conspiracy Theories," in Weinstein 1978.

↑"Mr. Hiss. I was born in Baltimore. Md., on November 11, 1904." HUAC 1948: 642 (PDF 152)

↑"Alger Hiss was born... in an upper-middle-class... family... The Hiss family was financially comfortable..." The Hisses were "prominent, respected people. They kept their own horse and carriage, and on occasion [Alger's father] would hire a private railroad car for a family outing.... they knew everyone they wanted to know in Baltimore, they belonged to the best clubs, and they were recognized wherever they went." (Smith 1976: 34) Contrary to ex-Communist ("I belonged for a little while to the Young Communist League, and thereafter to the Socialist party." Kempton 2004: 11) Murray Kempton's oft-repeated claim that Hiss was a "child of shabby gentility," (Kempton 2004: 17), Hiss protested that the economic circumstances of his childhood were "not particularly shabby." (White 2004: 4) Young Alger went to camp (HUAC 1948: 643 [PDF 153]) in Maine; he later participated "in the usual round of activities enjoyed by affluent college students of his time" (White 2004: 9); among his hobbies were tennis and horseback riding. (Morrow 2005: 248)

↑Scott 1996. According to the personal Web site of Hiss's son, Alger's father died on April 7, 1907—this in contrast to Kempton's claim that Hiss's father "committed suicide when Alger was nine." (Kempton 2004: 17) As G. Edward White puts it (somewhat charitably), Kempton's version of events is "not quite accurate." (White 2004: 4) Susan Jacoby also gets this wrong, writing of "the suicide of his father (when Alger was only five)" (Jacoby 2009: 62), an error she repeated on C-SPAN.

↑“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, agricultural price support programs led to vast amounts of food being deliberately destroyed at a time when malnutrition was a serious problem in the United States.... For example, the federal government bought 6 million hogs in 1933 alone and destroyed them. Huge amounts of farm produce were plowed under, in order to keep it off the market and maintain prices at the officially fixed level, and vast amounts of milk were poured down the sewers for the same reason. Meanwhile, many American children were suffering from diseases caused by malnutrition.” (Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics [New York: Basic Books, 2007] 3rd Ed., ISBN 0465002609, p. 56) As Gene Smiley, emeritus professor of economics at Marquette University, writes in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: "Reduced production, of course, is what happens in depressions, and it never made sense to try to get the country out of depression by reducing production further. In its zeal, the administration apparently did not consider the elementary impossibility of raising all real wage rates and all real prices." Onestudy found that such New Deal policies prolonged the Great Depression by about seven years.

↑Gall 1999: 41. According to Davis, the Ware group “was used, to my knowledge, for stealing documents from government agencies.” Her husband, she said, regularly supplied “a party contact confidential information from his job.” Davis added, “Everyone in Hal Ware's group had accepted the directive to get whatever we could for the party to use in any way it saw fit.” Eric Jacobs et al., "Arguments (New and Old) About the Hiss Case," Encounter, vol. 52 (March 1979), p. 87

↑"....Jerome Frank, the leading liberal judge on the court; Jerome Frank, the intellectual leader of the New Deal and architect of its most progressive legislation; Jerome Frank, the idol of young progressive law students and leader of the liberals when he taught law at Yale, who had led the fight against the conservatism of the old-guard faculty...." Arthur Kinoy, Rights on Trial: The Odyssey of a People's Lawyer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) ISBN 0674770137, p. 97

↑George N. Peek with Samuel Crowther, “In and Out: the Experiences of the First AAA Administrator,” The Saturday Evening Post, May 16, 1936, p. 5

↑Mr. Stripling. Are you a member of the Communist Party?
Mr. Collins. I decline to answer that question on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me.
...
Mr. Stripling. Did you ever meet Alger Hiss at that apartment?
Mr. Collins. I decline to answer that question for the same reason.
...
Mr. Stripling. Did you ever meet in the apartment of Alger Hiss on P Street in Georgetown in 1935?
Mr. Collins. I decline to answer that question on the grounds of possible self-incrimination.
...
Mr. Hebert. ...Now, why do you refuse to say whether you know Alger Hiss or not?...
Mr. Collins. I refuse to answer that question, sir, on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me. HUAC 1948: 802-810 (PDF 312-320)

↑Mr. COHN. Did you know Alger Hiss to be a member of the Communist party?
Mr. WEYL. Yes, I did.
Mr. COHN. Were you in the same Communist cell with Alger Hiss at one time?
Mr. WEYL. That is correct.
…
Mr. WEYL. ...Hiss and I were among the eight or nine people who met with the first meeting of that organization, I presume. So I was in this Communist cell with him for a period of approximately nine months.
Testimony of Nathaniel Weyl before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, February 23, 1953, pp. 619-620 (PDF pp. 658-659)

↑Nathaniel Weyl, “I Was in a Communist Unit with Hiss,” U.S. News and World Report, January 9, 1953

↑Mr. Hiss...I don't think I got any
compensation. Mr. Stripling. You just gave him the car? Mr. Hiss. I think the car just went right in with it... Mr. Stripling. What kind of a bill of sale did you give Crosley? Mr. Hiss. I think I just turned over—in the District you get a certificate of title, I think it is, I think I just simply turned it over to him. Mr. Stripling. Handed it to him? Mr. Hiss. Yes. HUAC 1948: 958-959 (PDF 468-469)

↑Hiss: "my letting Crosley use the Ford... it is even possible that he returned it to me after using it... Whether I gave him the car outright, whether the car came back, I don't know." HUAC 1948: 1093, 1095, 1104 (PDF 603, 605, 614)

↑Mr. NIXON. All right; you are willing to testify now then that since Mr. Smith did notarize your signature as of that time, that it is your signature? Mr. HISS. On the basis of the assumptions vou state, the answer is "Yes".... Mr. NIXON. You don't deny, however, that the notarization of your signature on the transfer to Cherner Motor Co. in July of 1936 is your signature? Mr. HISS. I certainly do not. HUAC 1948: 1116, 1119 (PDF 626, 629)

↑Mr. STRIPLING. I show you a photostatic copy of an assignment of title which was... subpenaed from the files, of the Vehicles and Traffic Division of the District of Columbia... It states in part... "Assignment of title. For value received the undersigned hereby sells, assigns, or transfer unto (name of purchaser)"; then, written in is "Cherner Motor Company; address, 1781 Florida Avenue, Northwest"... It says, "Signature of Assignor, Alger Hiss." Then it says, "On the 23d day of July 1936, before me, the subscriber, a notary public of the District of Columbia, personally appeared Alger Hiss, who made oath in due form of law that the above statements are true. Witness my hand and notarial seal, W. Marvin Smith, Notary Public." Is that your signature, Mr. Smith? Mr. SMITH. It sure does look like it. Mr. STRIPLING. You say it does? Mr. SMITH. Yes; I have no doubt it is. HUAC 1948: 1072 (PDF 582)

↑Transcripts: September 23, 1954; September 29, 1954. Noel Field file, Archives, Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior, quoted in Mária Schmidt, Behind the Scenes of the Showtrials of Central-Eastern Europe, Budapest 1993 (uncorrected manuscript), cited in Romerstein, Breindel 2001: 135; Mária Schmidt, “Noel Field—The American Communist at the Center of Stalin’s East European Purge: From the Hungarian Archives,” American Communist History 3, no. 2 (December 2004); Mária Schmidt, "The Hiss Dossier: A Historian's Report," The New Republic, November 8, 1993, pp. 17-20

↑Weinstein 1978: 319. "Mr. Levine. He gave me an envelope to put away for him some 10 years ago… I asked what would happen in the event both he and Esther were liquidated, and he said, 'You would know what to do with it, you are an attorney.'" HUAC 1948, Pt. 2: 1452 (PDF 80)

↑Testimony of Ambassador William Bullitt, April 8, 1952, “Communist influence on U.S. policies in the Far East,” Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 82nd Cong., 2d Sess. Hearings: March 13, 1951 to June 20, 1952; Report: July 2, 1952

↑"an exclamatory word or phrase; especially : one that is obscene or profane"; "an exclamation or swearword." Levine published his memoir in 1973, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, which popularized the use of "expletive" as a euphemism for "cuss word."

↑While Hiss would claim only to have worked "under... or in association with" Eleanor Roosevelt "in the Government" (HUAC 1948: 1163-1164 [PDF 673-674]), the First Lady would write that she knew Hiss “fairly well,” while her daughter Anna reportedly had known him “very well” (in contrast to Chambers, concerning whom Mrs. Roosevelt would sniff, “He’s not one of us”).

↑Years later, Hiss would comment from prison, "If the old man were alive, none of this would have happened." According to de Toledano, "the 'old man' was none other than Roosevelt himself." Chicago Tribune Washington bureau chief Walter Trohan disagreed with Hiss's assessment: "Roosevelt would have sacrificed Hiss at the snap of the finger. He would have sacrificed anybody..." Trohan 1970: 14

↑"Initially, Dies supported the New Deal." (William D. Pederson, The FDR years [Infobase Publishing, 2006] ISBN 0816053685, p. 67) "He was in full agreement with the Public Works Administration and with government regulation of banks and businesses. He proposed a comprehensive unemployment program of public works and wanted to use idle gold in Fort Knox to finance the relief program. He also asked Congress to increase gift and inheritance taxes, grant homestead exemptions on small farms and on homes worth five thousand dollars or less, and legislate tax differentials favoring small merchants." Dies also had a record of "support for governmental controls over giant corporations in order to preserve democracy and opportunity." George N. Green, The establishment in Texas politics: the primitive years, 1938-1957 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1984) ISBN 0806118911, pp. 69-70

↑Although one American public school teacher's guide claims that the Nazi-Soviet pact "was not an alliance. At the start of World War II, Joseph Stalin (...strongly anti-fascist) was aligned with Great Britain and France against the Axis Powers of Germany," etc., (World War II [Social Studies School Service, 2007] ISBN 156004313X, p. S11), this is false. As French Communist Party leader Jacques Duclos put it upon the Nazi conquest of France, "the struggle of the French people has had the same aim as the struggle of German Imperialism. It is correct that in this sense we had a temporary ally." (Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin's secret war [Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982] ISBN 0030472660, p. 187) Likewise, after the pact collapsed, the USSR joined the Allies, which the Communists viewed as another "temporary alliance." David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (Simon and Schuster, 2004) ISBN 0743264886, p. 408

↑ As the Jenner subcommittee would conclude in 1953: "There is ample evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies learned the underlying fact of the Communist conspiracy, and time and again performed their duty and notified the proper administrative agencies of this information." (SISS 1953: 1110 [PDF 50])

↑“At the time that Stalin acceded to President Roosevelt’s request and dissolved the Comintern in 1943, Soviet intelligence had to reorganize its espionage channels in the United States.” e-Dossier No. 11: Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Gregg Herken and Hayden Peake, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

↑“The International Department, created in 1943 essentially to carry out functions previously performed by the Third Communist International... was responsible for CPSU relations with nonruling communist parties in other states.” Departments of the Central Committee, Soviet Union, Country Studies, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1989

↑“During the latter part of the war, the KGB gradually took over assets and networks originally established by the GRU and the Comintern (particularly after Stalin dissolved the latter body in May 1943)." Benson, Warner 1996: Preface

↑According to Hiss, the agreement to give the Soviets three votes in the UN to one for the U.S. “was not put in the communiqué" containing the public Yalta agreement. It was, he said, an "oral agreement ... that the Russians would bring their two delegations [sic—actually three delegations—the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and Byelorussia] to [the UN Charter Conference in] San Francisco, propose them for admission [to the United Nations], and we [the United States] would agree. But it would not be announced in advance.” YUN 1990: 18 (PDF 19)

↑Stettinius 1975: 229. The official State Department record employs the passive voice to drop Hiss's leading role in this incident down the memory hole: "The desirability of unity being achieved between the Kuomintang and the Communists was raised, and reference was made to the President having some doubts as to whether the British desired this unity." Meeting of the Foreign Ministers, February 1, 1945, 10:30 A.M., on Board H. M. S. "Sirius" in Grand Harbor. FRUS 1945: 502 Press accounts relying on this bowdlerized official account thus reported, e.g.: "Alger Hiss, whose role at the Yalta conference long has been a subject for hostile speculation, spent his time there exclusively on planning for the United Nations."

↑"Too much stress cannot be laid on the hope that our economic assistance be carried out in China through the medium of a government fully and fairly representative of all important Chinese political elements, including the Chinese Communists," said Acheson. (Freda Utley, The China story [H. Regnery Co., 1951], p. 15) This was the pretext for the U.S. embargo on arms to China in July 1946. Even after the embargo ended in May 1947, Acheson was able to delay shipments another six months. In 1949, he would explicitly instruct his subordinates that "it is desirable that shipments be delayed where possible to do so without formal action." (David S. McLellan, Dean Acheson: the State Department years [New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1976] ISBN 0396073131, p. 188) After the fall of China, Senator John F. Kennedy would comment: "Mr. Speaker, over this weekend we have learned the extent of the disaster that has befallen China and the United States. The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the [Truman] White House and the [Acheson] Department of State. The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming unless a coalition government with the Communists was formed, was a crippling blow to the National Government. So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks, with the imperfection of the democratic system in China after twenty years of war, and the tales of corruption in high places, that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China." John F. Kennedy, A Compendium of Speeches, Statements, and Remarks Delivered During His Service in the Congress of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 41-42. Cf. Evans 2007: 419

↑Weinstein, Vassiliev 1999: 267-268. The Communist Party's ardor for the UN was evident that month, when the Party's general secretary wrote in an official organ of the CPUSA: "Great popular support and enthusiasm for the United Nations policies should be built up, well organized and fully articulate. But it is necessary to do more than that. The opposition must be rendered so impotent that it will be unable to gather any significant support in the Senate against the United Nations Charter and the treaties which will follow." Eugene Dennis, "Yalta and America's National Unity," Political Affairs, Vol. 24 (April 1945), p. 300

↑Stettinius 1975: 416. Weinstein observes, "The endorsement of a leading American official by the Russians remains practically unique in the annals of Soviet-American diplomacy at this time." Weinstein 1978: 361

↑Panuch would testify that "...Under Secretary Acheson called me into his office... and he said... '...I would like your resignation.'" As the Jenner subcommittee observed, after Panuch warned his superiors about Hiss, "it was Panuch and not Hiss who was dismissed from the State Department." SISS 1953: 10; 10n.15

↑Exhibit No. 285, Enclosure No. 2 To Despatch No. 418, April 26, 1956, From American Embassy, Canberra, Australia, LS. 1352: Statement of Vladimir Petrov, Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States, Part 28," Subcommittee To Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, June 6, 1956, p. 1521 (PDF p. 79)

↑Kim Philby, My Silent War (New York: Random House, Inc., 2002) ISBN 0375759832, p. 150. If Hiss was not a Soviet agent, he was the only one on this list who was not. For Philby to grant him primacy on such a roll of honor (or rogue's gallery) is "suggestive," writes Weinstein, that this master spy "evidently either knew or believed" that Hiss was a fellow agent. Weinstein 1978: 360, footnote

↑One FBI memo reports that TrumanJustice wanted the FBI to interview the Bentley suspects, with an eye to “presenting the evidence to a grand jury with the idea of letting them no bill the case. Further that in the event Congressman Thomas of the Un-American Committee should ever raise a question, it would be possible to answer by saying that the grand jury had considered the evidence and it had not deemed it sufficient to justify criminal action.” (FBI file: Hiss-Chambers, Vol. 96)

↑Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, United States Congress, Annual Report for the Year 1953 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1954), pp. 186-187 (PDF pp. 194-195) Following Hiss's HUAC testimony on August 5, Truman would read to the press a statement amplifying this order:

"No information of any sort relating to the employee's loyalty, and no investigative data of any type, whether relating to loyalty or other aspects of the individual's record, shall be included in the material submitted to a congressional committee."

↑Truman "wasn't fronting for Alger Hiss, per se, he thought they were attacking him through Hiss... Mr. Truman figured that that was a fight on him, so he supported Hiss whom he didn't really like; thought he was a terrible fellow." Trohan 1970: 14

↑Mr. Welles. All of these messages, Mr. Stripling, originally were sent in code and undoubtedly those marked "strictly confidential" or "strictly confidential, for the Secretary," would presumably be sent in one of the most secret codes then in our possession. Mr. Stripling. Would the possession of the document as written, along with the original document as it appeared in code, furnish an individual with the necessary information to break the code? Mr. Welles. In my judgment, decidedly yes. (HUAC 1948, Part 2: 1388 [PDF 16]) SAYRE: [T]hey didn't have these highly confidential codes; and for these telegrams to get out at the time they did meant that other governments could crack our codes. HUAC 1948, 2nd Rept., p. 6; cf. C.P. Trussel, "Spy Papers Show U.S. Codes Were Broken, Official Says," The New York Times, December 8, 1948; de Toledano, Lasky 1950: 221-223; Weinstein 1978: 232

↑Edward W. Knappman, ed., Great American Trials: 201 Compelling Courtroom Dramas (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1994) ISBN 1578591996, p. 444. Ironically, the standard work on psychopathic personality, the landmark The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (St. Louis, Mo.: CV Mosby Co., 1941) by Hervey Cleckley (coauthor of The Three Faces of Eve), identifies the psychopathic personality as possessing superficial charm and good intelligence, absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking, absence of nervousness or psychoneurotic manifestations, lack of remorse and shame, etc. (See pp. 338-339 [PDF 353-354])—characteristics far more descriptive of Hiss than Chambers. "I never liked him. I knew him..." said Ambassador James Cowles Hart Bonbright. "There was something about Alger that didn't ring true. He was young and attractive, he wrote well, but he just didn't seem trustworthy." Peter Jessup, Interview with James Cowles Hart Bonbright, Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, February 26, 1986

↑While Acheson defended this statement in public, privately he admitted "it was not one of the smartest things that I ever did in my life." Horace G. Torbert, Interview with Jack K. McFall, Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, May 9, 1988

↑Asked if they had “one shred” of evidence to back their thesis in seeking a new trial, the Hiss lawyers answered, “No, your Honor.” Ralph de Toledano, "Towards a Higher Imperative," Modern Age, Fall 1978, p. 412 (PDF p. 1)

↑Kovel defines his ideology as Marxian communism—the "realization" of what he calls "'first-epoch' socialism" (that is, "neither more nor less than the original announcement of the Communist Manifesto")—not in pursuit of "unfettered productivity" à la Marx, but to further fetter productivity in the interest of environmentalism.

↑Former Kennedy administration official Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. would use remarkably similar words the following year to defend Soviet agent Laurence Duggan as "an able public servant."

↑"The material in the Vassiliev notebooks corroborates the suspicion that Hiss was a longtime agent of Soviet military intelligence. That echoes the findings of Venona Project analysts, who concluded years ago that the code name 'Ales' in the intercepted Soviet cables was 'probably Alger Hiss.'" Alex Kingsbury, "Declassified Documents Reveal KGB Spies in the U.S.," U.S. News and World Report, July 17, 2009

↑Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987) ISBN 0060156325, p. 291; cf. Sidney Hook, "The Strange Case of Whittaker Chambers," Encounter, January 1976, p. 78. Likewise, when the FBI was looking for old Hiss family letters to compare with the Baltimore documents and pumpkin papers, the headmistress of Washington’s elitePotomac School (apparently Carol Preston)—who, "dressed in an upper class fashion and with mannerisms to match, seethed with venom” as she “refused to give any letters”—“said that if Alger Hiss told her himself that he was a Soviet spy she wouldn't believe it." (Schecter 2002: 170) A professional Hiss partisan made a remarkably similar confession. White 2004: 208

125. The wreckage of Chicago's Federal Building after the explosion of a bomb allegedly planted by the International Workers of the World (lWW) as a reprisal for the sentencing of the union's leader, "Big Bill" Haywood, and 94 other members for seditious activities, 1918. 165-WW-l64B-7. (american_cities_125.jpg), Pictures of the American City

"About This Site" (States that this "Web site has been created with grants from... the Nation Institute," which "is closely linked to" The Nation, "a magazine that identified itself as solidly pro-Hiss in the 1950s" (White 2004: 133), and is now "pretty much the last general-interest magazine in America that remains committed to the idea of Hiss's innocence" (aka "America's leading forum for Alger Hiss apologia)—the Nation "embraced a prejudiced view of the Hiss-Chambers affair in 1948 and has been unable to wriggle free even yet." It "receives funding from... the Open Society Institute," which is "the most prominent of the numerous foundations belonging to the international billionaire financier George Soros." Also states "this Web site will post a... a comprehensive look at the case for the defense."